Quotes About Political Institutions

#1. The subordinated group has inadequate redress through existing political institutions, and is deterred thereby from organizing into conventional political struggle and opposition.

Kate Millett

#2. The degree to which people in developed countries take political institutions for granted was very much evident in the way that the United States planned, or failed to plan, for the aftermath of its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Francis Fukuyama

#3. There is no country in the world in which everything can be provided for by laws, or in which political institutions can prove a substitute for common sense and public morality.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#4. Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.

Michael Novak

#5. Political institutions are fair game in political debates in a democracy. Nothing is more fair game, in fact, than political matters of public concern.

Marvin Ammori

#6. The test of political institutions is the condition of the country whose future they regulate.

Benjamin Disraeli

#7. All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.

Hannah Arendt

#8. If the country is to survive as a democracy it will depend on voters who understand how our political institutions have evolved and the events that went into their creation. A nation's sense of its history is indistinguishable from its social cohesion.

Alan Bullock

#9. The safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.

James Madison

#10. The idea of a world commonweal has to be established as the criterion of political institutions, and also as the criterion of general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains. It has to dominate education everywhere in the world. When that end is achieved, then the world state will be achieved ...

H.G.Wells

#11. For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

#12. it was not so much the new machines that revolutionized the world, impressive and important as they were. The truly heroic invention was the economic, social, and political institutions in which these machines were embedded.

Sven Beckert

#13. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.

Abraham Lincoln

#14. Ownership of the means of production, on the other hand, carries a power to which the traditional safeguards of our political institutions are unequal.

Albert Einstein

#15. Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation.

Vladimir Lenin

#16. Religion is a set of social and political institutions and spirituality is a private pursuit which may or may not take place in a church setting.

D. Patrick Miller

#17. So we're all living spirit. It's not about isms and schims or religions. Religions are almost like political institutions, but the heart of it is the spirituality.

Surya Das

#18. As God can protect his people under the greatest despotism, so the utmost civil liberty is no safety to them without the immediate protection of his Almighty arm. I fear that Christians in this country have too great a confidence in political institutions ... [rather] than of the government of God.

Alexander Carson

#19. You can almost see voters nodding their heads at home: The public's faith in politicians and political institutions has been on a steep and dangerous decline for decades, because elected leaders fail to deliver.

Ron Fournier

#20. I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals ... I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose.

Robert A. Heinlein

#21. Everybody in the world is capable of democratic development. Some people in the world are unlucky enough to get stuck with really bad political leadership and with really bad political institutions.

Condoleezza Rice

#22. Tocqueville writes that, for Americans, religion must be regarded as the first of their political institutions.

Dinesh D'Souza

#23. The only justifiable purpose of political institutions is to ensure the unhindered development of the individual.

Albert Einstein

#24. Pakistan's future viability, stability and security lie in empowering its people and building political institutions. My goal is to prove that the fundamental battle for the hearts and minds of a generation can be accomplished only under democracy.

Benazir Bhutto

#25. Free and just political institutions are absolutely essential to the progress and development both of the individual and of the race.

Hugh Price Hughes

#26. can we imagine political institutions that might regulate today's global patrimonial capitalism justly as well as efficiently?

Thomas Piketty

#27. The aim of political institutions like the United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for nations to stay on the right side of that line ...

Javier Perez De Cuellar

#28. No light privilege is it to have a hand in building up the moral life of these new communities; no common honour surely to help to lay side by side with the foundations of their free political institutions the broad and deep foundations of the Church of God.

Henry Parry Liddon

#29. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all

Thomas Kuhn

#30. In fairness, Latin America's elected civilian leaders have made progress in some areas. They have brought their countries back to international respectability, curbed flagrant human rights violations, and sought to build democratic political institutions.

Stephen Kinzer

#31. In America, communities existed before governments. There were many groups of people with a common sense of purpose and a feeling of duty to one another before there were political institutions.

Daniel J. Boorstin

#32. Christians in this country have found themselves under selective assault. God has, almost overnight, been removed from the educational, legal, and political institutions of the country.

Daniel Lapin

#33. The philanthropic tradition is older than democracy, older than Christianity, and older than higher education. It gives form and purpose to personal and social life that cannot be provided by the self-interest of economic enterprise or required by the mandate of political institutions.

Robert L. Payton

#34. A free economy is as essential to society as democratic political institutions. A strong market-based economy is the fertile ground for democratic freedoms that we think are important.

Lee R. Raymond

#35. I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I'm telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy!

Dalai Lama

#36. There have been two lines of progress in this world-political and religious. In the former the Greeks are everything, the modern political institutions being only the development of the Grecian; in the latter the Hindus are everything.

Swami Vivekananda

#37. So religion, which among the Americans never directly takes part in the government of society, must be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use of it.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#38. Vichy emerged not only from what divided the French but also what united them: pacifism, fear of population decline, loss of confidence in national identity, anti-Semitism, discontent with existing political institutions, ambivalence about modernity. The existence of this common

Julian T. Jackson

#39. China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

Matt Ridley

#40. Let it be immediately added, however, that this economic independence and prosperity has always been absolutely associated in the American mind with free political institutions.

Herbert Croly

#41. Republican patience with how unionism deals with the political institutions, and with key issues like equality and human rights, will be tested because, obviously, there will be a battle a day on these matters. So lets face up to all of this with our eyes wide open.

Gerry Adams

#42. Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.

Adolf Hitler

#43. Within this historic and optimistic future in mind, I have made no value judgment of the destiny bestowed on each nation. For all this, however, leadership matters; so do the institutional structures and the system of political governance.

Patrick Mendis

#44. Political art - not always a contradiction in terms - can destroy institutions, or eat away at them.

Joe Haldeman

#45. Modern society, the political body, the legal and judiciary system, the state of governance, capitalism and the very fabric of the society itself, including our religions and so-called morals and values, are institutions steeped in traditions of absolute and total violence.

Bryant McGill

#46. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.

George C. Marshall

#47. The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.

Thomas Sowell

#48. For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!

Adolf Hitler

#49. As a political movement, feminism seeks to transform society by challenging and changing social institutions. Religion, on the other hand, seeks first to transform individuals through a personal relationship with God, which then results in a desire to work for the transformation of society.

Helen LaKelly Hunt

#50. Anarchism is that political philosophy which advocates the maximization of individual responsibility and the reduction of concentrated power regal, dictatorial, parliamentary: the institutions which go loosely by the name of "government" to a vanishing minimum.

Alex Comfort

#51. The performance of international institutions will be symptomatic of the domestic political priorities of influential member states. International institutions don't really have a life and a mind of their own.

Samantha Power

#52. Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

Gilles Deleuze

#53. The citizen can bring our political and governmental institutions back to life, make them responsive and accountable, and keep them honest. No one else can.

John Gardner

#54. You need some inequality to grow ... but extreme inequality is not only useless but can be harmful to growth because it reduces mobility and can lead to political capture of our democratic institutions.

Thomas Piketty

#55. There are few colonial nations anymore. Instead, we are colonized by financial institutions beyond our political control. We are colonized with pens and papers and millions of little digital bursts transferring billions of dollars all over the globe in the blink of an eye.

Charlie Pierce

#56. Our political way of life is by the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God, and of course presupposes the existence of God, the moral ruler of the universe, and a rule of right and wrong, of just and unjust, binding upon man, preceding all institutions of human society and government.

John Quincy Adams

#57. The faith of a church or of a nation is an adequate faith only when it inspires and enables people to give of their time and energy to shape the various institutions - social, economic, and political - of the common life.

James Luther Adams

#58. For me 'Oliver Twist' is a political novel. It is a furious critique of the treatment of orphans and poor children who were forced to spend their early lives in ghastly institutions.

Henning Mankell

#59. The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.

Max Horkheimer

#60. To fully absorb the lessons of the Internet, urge the Internet-centrists, we need to reshape our political and social institutions in its image.

Evgeny Morozov

#61. It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

Lyndon B. Johnson

#62. Political and social institutions are to be judged by the good or harm that they do to individuals. Do they encourage creativeness rather than possessiveness? Do they embody or promote a spirit of reverence between human beings? Do they preserve self-respect? In

Bertrand Russell

#63. The western mindset erroneously equates a political system of multi-party democracy with high-quality institutions ... the two are not synonymous.

Dambisa Moyo

#64. Religions centered on the worship of a male God create "moods" and "motivations" that keep women in a state of psychological dependence on men and male authority, while at the same legitimating the political and social authority of fathers and sons in the institutions of society.

Carol P. Christ

#65. Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.

Robert M. Pirsig

#66. I mean, what's the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you're trained to be a ruler - they both can run because they're financed by the same corporate institutions.

Noam Chomsky

#67. The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.

Ludwig Von Mises

#68. What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

Edgar Quinet

#69. All political revolutions, not affected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions.

John Stuart Mill

#70. Our plan will not favor religious institutions over nonreligious institutions. As president, I'm interested in what is constitutional and I'm interested in what works.

George W. Bush

#71. Poverty is a symptom - of the absence of a workable economy built on credible political, social, and legal institutions.

Steven D. Levitt

#72. Democratic Development is a process of political struggle in which democrats work gains the upper hand in the society over non-democrats which directs aid at core political processes and institutions especially elections, political parties and politically oriented civil groups.

David Eddings

#73. The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

Christopher Dawson

#74. All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Roland Barthes

#75. The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

Douglass North

#76. As Christian feel the changing winds of political climate, the blasts against their values in the media, the exclusion of the Christian faith from educational institutions, they begin to sense the dangers of complacency and of pietistical world flight.

Edmund Clowney

#77. Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.

James F. Cooper

#78. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.

Peter Drucker

#79. The days of discriminating against religious institutions simply because they are religious must come to an end.

George W. Bush

#80. The problem with monasteries, ashrams, convents is these institutions become extremely political. In other words, they're really small societies, and much of what you hope to avoid in societies you find there.

Frederick Lenz

#81. The abuse of political power is not as important as the loss of lives. Plus there is a process for curing the abuse of institutions.

Babatunde Fashola

#82. In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power.

Hans Haacke

#83. With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.

Doris Lessing

#84. What makes me worry today is the alarming decline in the trust in democratic institutions - political parties, Parliaments, political leaders. Less and less people are going to the polls in most advanced democracies.

Ivan Krastev

#85. We are rather candid with them about the nature of their political processes and the state of development of their institutions, but they are looking to the West because they know that's where success lies

Colin Powell

#86. My fear is that many institutions will eventually alter how they treat people who refuse to self-track. There are all sorts of political and moral implications here, and I'm not sure that we have grappled with any of them.

Evgeny Morozov

#87. America does not need another political campaign based on denial and avoidance of some of our real problems. It needs a crusade to reform and renew our country, its institutions and political system.

Richard Lamm

#88. A democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse, carrying down to the lowest grade in society the desire and ambition of political domination.

John Stuart Mill

#89. We no longer need companies, institutions, or government to organize us. We now have the tools to organize ourselves. We can find each other and coalesce around political causes or bad companies or talent or business or ideas.

Jeff Jarvis

#90. We live in a world where there is a need for pluralistic institutions and for recognizing different types of freedom, economic, social, cultural, and political, which are interrelated.

Amartya Sen

#91. It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.

Rick Perlstein